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What does a Help Authoring Tool give you over Drupal?

Comparing Help Authoring Tools (HATs) with Drupal is like comparing apples with oranges.

HATs are used by Technical Authors to create content in various formats for end users to read. Drupal is open-source software that is used to create websites for users such that they can contribute to the content (for example: blogs, personal or corporate websites, e-commerce sites and intranets).

That said, if you are a HAT user and then have to work in Drupal, it is useful to be forewarned of the main differences. The top 3 things that a HAT user will miss when starting to use Drupal:

1. The most frustrating thing about using Drupal, having come from a HAT background, is having no summary list of pages (topics) available in a different frame.

As an Administrator in Drupal, you can view a list of pages, but you can only edit the properties of one page at a time. There is no multiple-selecting and no drag-and-dropping. So topic management can be very labourious.

2. Out of the box, there is no way of managing links. So, for example:

If you delete a page then all links pointing to it will break, and there are no messages to warn you.

When creating a link in a page you have to know the path and name of the destination page – there are no helpful lists of available pages.

There are modules you can install, which can help. The “Links” module is the most complete on paper but, in Drupal 6, it can cause a programming error (i.e. not an error in the way I installed it).

3. Out of the box there is no WYSIWYG editor. For the majority of HAT users this is a must. You can only write your content in full/filtered html.

I highly recommend installing the “Wysiwyg” module. This module makes it much easier to install WYSIWYG editors. Some of these are less successful than others. If you are interested in keeping your underling code clean (i.e. free from unnecessary <span> tags created by inline styling), I recommend the “TinyMCE” editor.